


any four walls are a prison

by pocketpauling



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom
Genre: Body Horror, M/M, body horror?, exploring some of uh. the ideas of immortal powerful being tommy, final boss tommy, idk how im making this a game and not a game but its both., introspection momence, the others ARE here but they dont talkkkkkkkk, tommy will live for hundreds of years and not remember what its like to feel compassion, uhhhh maybe someeee descriptions of violence but not very graphic, who maybe has forgotten how to care for others
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:34:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25460197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketpauling/pseuds/pocketpauling
Summary: the best part of a video game is when they call back to the tutorial in the final boss fight. part of tommy knows he should have expected this from the start. and they called dr. coomer and bubby the tutorial npcs. ha! joke’s on them.
Relationships: Gordon/Tommy (HLVRAI)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 102





	any four walls are a prison

**Author's Note:**

> it is what it is.

xen was wet, and tommy was tired.

of course, xen had been wet, bloody, alive in the worst way imaginable since its small corner of the universe formed. small, insignificant, the same way that earth was. two pins in an infinite bolt of fabric, tied together with a weak length of thread, snagged on a nail, pinched together. boring, boring, set aside to be cut away. just scraps.

and, of course, tommy had been tired since it began, tired of earth and the people who lived there. but earth was important because his father decided it was, because his _employers_ decided it was. tommy knew that he shouldn’t ask more questions. so he didn’t. if there was something even bigger than them, he didn’t want to see it. could not imagine it. did not want to know it. 

and through it all, he didn’t envy his teammates, the small creatures he was meant to babysit. play with, busy himself with while things worked themselves out. keep them just this side of alive, pull the strings just enough to keep them suspended on the tightrope. put on a show, if there were anyone watching. he knew very little of the plans his father had laid out, but he knew how to tug a few small almost-humans - and some rogue xen _something_ , a species he never bothered to learn the name of - along a preset storyline. was there to push them forward, when the team was content to sit around and chat.

run a race here, drop a few hints there. small, small people. small people who needed so much help. he almost felt bad lying about where he came from, his family. invented a dog on the spot, and then had to _create_ that dog out of thin air just for narrative consistency, at his father’s insistence. important work, but it wasn’t important. it was tiring, and tommy was tired.

the five-year-old comments had been funny at first, but that was short lived. and tommy knew, knew he shouldn’t care. but something about a man who didn’t even know what tommy was, didn’t know what _any_ of them were, saying tommy was infantile, got to him. got to him so bad. would get to anyone, he reasoned. would cause anyone to become bitter, to be angry, to be _petty_. careless. careless with the state of the player, because as long as gordon was _alive_ , it didn’t matter what particular state he was in. 

_bud_ this and ‘ _the gun, kid_ ’ that. kid. kid! gordon, the youngest member of the group by _far_. kid. the absolute fucking -

when skeletons hung out in gordon’s peripheral vision, tommy said nothing. let him think he was going mad, tried to tamp down the guilt at gordon’s fear, the panic that had him speaking a mile a minute, trying to get someone to understand.

when bubby and benry whispered to each other in corners, while gordon slept, while gordon looked directly at them, tommy pretended to know nothing about it. defended them, even, knowing the whole time what they were planning. when his father told him to not interfere, he had no issue with it. 

he thought he had no issue with it when the room went dark, and no one but him could see. watched them break his nose, his wrist. dig the knife out of their fatigues and into the gap of his suit, deep, too deep, _too deep_ , cracking bones, sounds that rung in his ears and burrowed under his skin. 

the screaming, god, the screaming, of gordon and the team and him, he thinks. that was him shouting too, crying out for them to stop. it was enough, he’d had enough. the morphine of the suit could only do so much for a waking amputation.

tommy felt bad. but he didn’t. but he did. there was nothing to do, and everything he could have done. he only thought there would be a few bruises.

his father could still keep secrets.

tommy was the guardrail, the game’s fucked up tutorial, so he stuck behind. ran away, or something, to help gordon back to his feet, dust him off and defend him from headcrabs. look into his eyes, somewhere faraway, and feel sad and angry, guilty and smug at the same time. none of them felt particularly good, and watching the man he’d come to resent over the past week nearly bleed out in front of him hadn’t been as satisfying as he thought it would be. at least if it had been benry, it would have been entertaining.

this was like watching a baby bird die in your hands, one that kept you up all hours of the night, made you late for work in the mornings, gave you headaches, made you miserable. and one night, you watch it fall from its nest, and you ignore it til morning, and you find it struggling to breathe, body broken on your back patio. there’s absolutely nothing you can do to change how little you’d cared.

tommy wants the game to end.

the feeling terrifies him. he wants it to stop. the feeling of seeing something this small, this defenseless lose part of itself is something that hurts more than anything he’s experienced in the last few hundred years, at _least_. and he’s not even talking about the hand, his dad will take care of the hand. he’s not worried. he’s just - he’s seen gordon lose so much of his humanity, his morality, his… _everything_ , that he’s not sure gordon’s even fully gordon anymore. theseus’s ship made real. if you replace every part of a person, who are they at the end?

and where will gordon be, after this? alone with his son, trying to cope with something he’ll never understand? powers too big for him to ever begin to imagine? at least if he’s _here_ , there’s the team, and the adrenaline, and tommy’s hand in his as he pulls him through hall after hall after hall of soldiers and monsters, living nightmares, but it’s _okay_ , because the way gordon clings to his shirt when they stop to rest is like... an injured baby bird, and, and if he nurses the bird back to health, that’s enough of an apology, right? an olive branch, one that gordon didn’t know he needed to accept. 

and tommy needed _him_ , needed gordon’s stupid mumbling telling him he was okay, needed some kind of reassurance that he wasn’t the bad guy, can’t be the bad guy. a bystander to a crime is still violent in their inaction, and he knows there is blood on his hands.

tommy doesn’t want the game to end.

he doesn’t understand the emotion he’s feeling, not really. it’s some stupid - it’s human bullshit, definitely, something he hasn’t experienced in so long he’s forgotten how to feel it. and it feels like an attack, it hurts, and he hates it.

he doesn’t want the game to end, wants to understand so desperately. wants gordon to be safe, wants to stop feeling evil, feeling terrible, like he’s killed something wonderful, set fire to a gift, dropped a baby bird out a second story window. he doesn’t want to be bad, not anymore. can’t do it anymore. won’t do it anymore.

he stops leading, before xen. stops trying so hard, stops pushing forward. asks gordon to go back, maybe they should go back. maybe whatever’s through this portal is too much for them to handle right now, let’s take a rest. grab some sodas, you remember soda? he has so much soda, can pop anything he wants out of thin air, just ask. any flavor, just ask. just stay.

gordon raises an eyebrow and laughs it off. gordon wants to go home. 

tommy isn’t angry, but it’s something close.

and xen is wet, bloody, sticky. tentacles and eyes, otherworldly to gordon. tommy can hear his heartbeat from a few feet away, but he’s not sure if it has to do entirely with how loud it is. 

benry’s gloating above them, taunting them in his own fucked up way. incomprehensible, the dumbest shit imaginable, because he barely understands the language he’s letting drift out of his mouth. playing a part so alien to him, using words he doesn’t know the meaning of. 

gordon calls him big. tommy would still say this is small.

tommy can tell benry’s confused, given his new role. he wanted to be bad, of course. wanted to kill gordon off, but this wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. he’s watching a creature grapple with being chosen as the final boss without fully understanding what it did to get itself there. it’s pathetic, in the most meaningless kind of way. a weed that doesn’t know why the flowers around it are being choked down, doesn’t know why everyone is so angry at it. it’s just trying to survive.

so is gordon, so is the team. if there’s going to be daisies, the weeds have to go. they’ll survive just fine somewhere else.

tommy has never gardened, because it sounds like it’d be boring. but the way gordon talks about the bell peppers and bleeding hearts he has at home, it makes him want to try it, maybe.

you can’t garden in a prison, but everywhere tommy’s ever been has been a prison, anyway. maybe, if they stay here, tommy can lead them down to hydroponics and they’ll be happy enough with that. 

xen is wet, bloody, meat with no brain. wraps itself around your ankles, cements you to the floor if you stop for a moment. and would that be so bad? to be stuck here, with them? with him? if he kept gordon here, in this room, would it all be okay? 

tommy really thought he’d conquered emotions centuries ago. like how his father told him to. because you can’t be soft in this line of work, can’t feel for the people you’re leading. the pied piper wouldn’t be able to drown those rats in the river if he’d realized they’re just living beings, too. just want to survive, like weeds, like that dumb baby bird, who - if it just had never fallen in the first place, tommy wouldn’t feel all these stupid fucking feelings for something so much lesser than him.

and it’s not anger, but it’s close. pushes him over the edge. breaks something, somewhere. his father can’t stop it, doesn’t even realize it. but tommy’s sick of it all, just wants everyone to go back, wants things to go back to when gordon was _nothing_ , a bleeding heart, a bird safe in a nest, somewhere away from tommy. far away. a panic, a switch, a number ticks up into negative, and tommy sees void for a second, just a second.

wherever he ends up, it’s warm. and small, a cylinder of breathing meat, empty ribcage welded together, mutated to hell and back. he can’t stand to his full height, ceiling too low, and the spikes are digging into his ankles. hard enough to draw blood, if he ever bled to begin with, which he doesn’t think he can. can he? he doesn’t think so.

the ceiling gives easily with a push, but it doesn’t open up to something else - it just expands upwards. stretching the walls until something snaps, red parting like wires whipping the air, a wound that knits itself together again in seconds. it would be sickening, if he cared about that thing anymore. if he was 20 again, or 200, or whatever age he was before he stopped caring about blood and guts and torn muscles, he might have had an entire breakdown because of it. but he’s above that, now.

it… makes him sick, regardless. reminds him of that ugly orange hev suit, exposed bone, the torn flesh of gordon’s right hand, and he feels like he’s dizzy, like somehow this is different. how the fuck could this be different? why is this different, what right does gordon have to come into his head and tell him how to feel about unrelated viscera? 

he closes his eyes when he moves the walls out to give himself more space. ignores what it oozes on his hands, ignores the tearing underneath his fingers. gives it a good few minutes before he opens his eyes to find everything fine again. 

enough room to sit and wait for someone to find him.

**Author's Note:**

> this is more morally gray than i usually like my tommy but i was compelled by an otherworldly force to write this. i vibe so hard w immortal beings being so desensitized they forget how to care, or love. they forget what its like, and when it comes back, it feels like an attack. hurts them. so yes. kinda mean tommy moments


End file.
